R for the masses with Power BI

Today we are excited to announce that the Power BI service now supports reports and dashboards with R visuals. This update expands Power BI service visuals with endless flexibility, and adds advanced analytics depth.

These new rich R visuals are fully integrated into Power BI service reports, and can be filtered, cross filtered, and pinned to dashboards. The R visuals can be viewed by Power BI users without them having to be aware of this underlying technology.

With millions of users and thousands of ready-to-use packages, the R language adds great extensibility to Power BI, with endless complementary capabilities for analyzing and visualizing data.

Go ahead and try it!

We've created an example of a Power BI Desktop file (pbix file) with R scripts. To try it yourself, download the file and open it in Power BI Desktop, publish your report to the Power BI service, and experience R visuals in action.

How are R visuals created?

Authoring of R visuals is done in Power BI Desktop, and then published to the Power BI service. First, the report author has to create a new R visual, by selecting the R icon in the visualizations pane.

After inserting the R visual type on the report canvas, the author can then drag data into the values fields, and finally paste the R script into the R script editor pane. Once the authoring is done, the new report containing R visuals has to be published to the Power BI service.

R visuals in the Power BI Service

R visuals behave in the service like any other visual in Power BI: users can interact, filter, slice, and pin them to a dashboard, or share them with others.

Generating R visuals can be very easy! For example, the correlation plot shown above required only one line of R code: corrplot(M). Users who view R visuals in dashboards and reports do not need an understanding of R to gain insights.

In the visual below, you can see how the R script created a prediction of user visits over time: